FOR MINNIE WHITE

When the first accordion washed up from the ocean three hundred billion years ago, it flexed its shell and stretched its gills, belched an organful of water from its nascent lung, gurgled and squelched, began to hum.

When Mary Agnes Hoskins stumbles over one on a beach, she’s seven. She runs a hand over its mother-of-pearl, pulls kelp from its grill. The accordion groans. Minnie’s father helps her lug it home. She nurses it through honks and wheezes,

teaches it breathing exercises, wheedles out a jig. A few winters later no dance in town is the same without her. At sixteen, Minnie reels across the island to a new home in the hills. She marries, has a couple of kids, tucks her instrument under a bed.

Every now and then she plucks a button from the accordion to mend a shirt. She borrows its strap for a door-latch, its bellows to shade a lamp. A litter of mice in its shell listens to Minnie playing piano. The accordion flotsams.

As one by one Minnie’s six children stretch their gills, set out for new shores. Thirty billionths of a billion years go by. Minnie tugs a box from under a bed, blows dust off iridescence. She feels its pulse. The walls around her begin to move.

Minnie White was a precocious accordion player from a young age, but only began performing professionally at the age of 55. In the 1960s she became an iconic folk musician, Newfoundland’s “First Lady of the Accordion.” She continued playing into her 80s, and was awarded the Order of Canada in 1993. As a kid I was fascinated by her photo on the cover of The Hills of Home, a grinning Minnie in her trademark formal gown and earrings, arms around an accordion almost as big as herself.